Mar 30, 2015

Even before Qualcomm rolled out the Snapdragon 810 chip into the wild, we had been hearing a lot of rumors about the silicone piece being plagued by overheating issues.

The fact that Qualcomm tried to perfect the platform before the first devices bundling it started shipping out didn't help much either, as concerns regarding overheating haven’t dissipated yet. Anyway, the debate around the Snapdragon 810 will probably be over once the company releases its next chipset, an event that doesn't seem that far away. Snapdragon 815 is Qualcomm’s next take on a SoC (system on a chip), and according to the information we have, the silicone piece is expected to arrive on the market in the coming months.

As we told you a few days ago, the chipset was already tested in benchmarks and was pitted against previous models, including the Snapdragon 801 and Snapdragon 810, while running Asphalt 8 Airborne, a demanding mobile game from Gameloft. The results showed that the Snapdragon 815 runs much cooler than both Snapdragon 801 and Snapdragon 810.

Snapdragon 815 details revealed

While these preliminary results seemed pretty encouraging, we still didn't know much about the specifics of this particular chip. However, the folks at Gizmo China received a tip revealing more info about Qualcomm’s upcoming silicone platform. The Snapdragon 815 will apparently come with four Cortex A72 and four Cortex A53 cores on a big.LITTLE architecture. The chip will reportedly be made using the new FinFet process (probably 16nm) and will be outfitted with Qualcomm’s next-gen Adreno GPU. The source also mentions that Qualcomm might tweak the cores to boost performance. So it appears the Snapdragon 815 will be pretty similar to the Snapdragon 620, which has already been launched.

The exception is that the Snapdragon 815 will be manufactured on a smaller node and will take advantage of all the features that can be expected from a premium Snapdragon 800 model. Earlier leaked info about the Snapdragon 815 also revealed that the new SoC would arrive with a LDDR4 RAM and would use a MSM9X55 LTE-A Cat. 10 modem. If you’re wondering why Qualcomm is taking its time to launch the new, less prone to heating Snapdragon 815, it’s because the chip giant doesn't want to hurt sales of the LG G Flex 2 or HTC One M9 flagships, which just went on sale. The Snapdragon 810 will also make it into several other flagships in the following months, like the LG G4, Sony Xperia Z4 or OnePlus Two.